1. Field of the Invention
In embodiments, there is disclosed the use of external knowledge in the process of updating dialog, text and/or visual session data storage from the current mode result (such as an automatic speech recognition result).
2. Background
Spoken computer-dialog systems in which a human caller is talking to a computer (e.g., through a telephone or other audio enabled device) are known. In such systems the computer is able to generate speech output, either as synthesized or prerecorded speech or a mixture of the two. The system may further feature an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine, which analyses sound data digitized from a caller's utterances. The ASR engine generates a speech recognition result which contains an ordered list of alternative interpretations. Each interpretation consists of one or more information items. The speech recognition result is then passed to a dialog manager for further analysis, at the end of which the dialog manager generates a textual output suitable for speech output generation. Such automatic speech recognizers can produce inaccurate results, especially for utterances that are acoustically similar. Quite often external knowledge is available that could be used to favor or reject certain parts of the recognition result. The problem is how to consistently apply such knowledge, especially in combination with the information gathered in the history of a dialog.